Hebrew literaturethe body of written works produced in the Hebrew language and distinct from Jewish literature, which also exists in other languages.

Literature in Hebrew has been produced uninterruptedly from the early 12th century BC, and certain excavated tablets may indicate a literature of even greater antiquity. From 1200 BC to c.AD 200, Hebrew was a spoken language in Palestine, first as biblical Hebrew, then as Mishnaic Hebrew, a later dialect that does not derive directly from the biblical dialect and one that gained literary status as the Pharisees began to employ it in their teaching in the 2nd century BC. It was not revived as a spoken language until the late 19th century, and in the 20th century it was adopted as the official language of the new State of Israel. The latter event gave impetus to a growing movement in Hebrew literature centred in Israel.

Hebrew literature is not synonymous with Jewish literature. Some Hebrew writing was produced by the Samaritans and in the 17th century by Protestant enthusiasts. Jews also produced important literatures in Greek, Aramaic, Arabic, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), Yiddish, and a number of other languages. Apart from the Aramaic writings, however, such literatures always served only that part of Jewry using the language in question. When the community ceased to exist, the literature produced in that language was forgotten (or, in the case of Greek Jewish literature, became part of Christian tradition) except for whatever part of it had been translated into Hebrew and thus became part of Hebrew literature.

The Hebrew language, though not spoken between c.AD 200 and the late 19th century, has always adapted itself to the needs of changing literary tastes. In the Bible it develops from a simple and earthy idiom to a language suitable for the expression of sophisticated religious thought without losing the poetic force and rhythmic fullness that characterizes it. Mishnaic Hebrew is pedestrian and exact, and yet it can reach heights of irony or of warmth. In medieval poetry Hebrew allows extravagant displays of verbal artistry but also, in northwestern Europe, a simplicity equal to that of the spoken languages of its milieu. One generation of translators in the 12th century created a scientific Hebrew that is not inferior to contemporary Arabic or Latin in precision or syntactic refinement. The 17th–19th centuries saw the formation of a stately, rigid, classical style based on biblical Hebrew, but at the same time eastern European mystics made the language serve the expression of their love of God. Literary Hebrew in the 20th century draws upon ancient literature to a marked degree, with styles often modeled upon ancient predecessors. The modern period has also evolved a new type of language for nonliterary writing, while in novels the style is often based upon the spoken language.

Ancient Hebrew literature

Preexilian period, c. 1200–587 BC

All that is preserved of the literature of this period is slightly more than 20 of the 39 books included in the Old Testament (the remainder being from the next period). Poetry probably preceded prose. Biblical poetry was based on the principle of parallelism; i.e., the two halves of a verse express the same idea, either by repeating it in different words or by stressing different aspects of it. Examples are found in the book of Psalms: “But they flattered him with their mouths; they lied to him with their tongues” (Ps. 78:36); “He turned their rivers to blood, so that they could not drink of their streams” (Ps. 78:44). To this form was added a simple rhythm, consisting mainly in having each half of a line divided into an equal number of stressed words. There were also folk songs, to which belonged perhaps large parts of the Song of Solomon, dirges, epic chants, and psalms. The use of various forms of poetry in the work of the prophets appears to be a later development.

The earlier prose texts were still very close to poetry in structure and language. The first real prose may well have been some of the laws recorded in the Pentateuch. In Jeremiah and Deuteronomy a high standard of prose rhetoric was achieved: some of the conversations in the historical books were attempts to reproduce in writing the style of ordinary speech. (See also biblical literature: Texts and versions.)

Period of the Second Temple, 538 BC–AD 70

The literary output of this period was large, only part of it belonging to the biblical canon. The biblical Hebrew of the writings was artificial because it had ceased to be spoken and had been replaced by Aramaic, a related Semitic language, and Mishnaic Hebrew. Works that are included among the Dead Sea Scrolls belong to this period. Some of these works provide evidence of a new kind of writing, the homiletic, or sermonizing, commentary to the Bible called Midrash. The only work of real literary merit among the scrolls is the fervent personal poetry of the Hymns of Thanksgiving.

Parts of the biblical books of Ezra and Daniel and certain works among the Dead Sea Scrolls are in an early form of Aramaic. This period also began to provide translations (called Targums) of most of the Hebrew Bible into a slightly later Aramaic.

Talmudic literature

In contrast to the works of the Bible and the Second Temple were the collections of writings concerned with Jewish civil and religious law. Whereas the former were lengthy writings bearing the imprint of their authors or editors, early rabbinic literature consisted entirely of collections of individual statements loosely strung together. The individual paragraphs exhibit the influence of Hellenistic rhetoric. Collections that follow the arrangement of biblical books are called Midrash, as opposed to works such as the Mishna, where the material is arranged according to subject. The Mishna was the main work of the period c. 100 BC–AD 200. The following period, AD 200–500, was notable for two main innovations: the appearance of an additional literary centre in Babylonia, where Jewry flourished in contrast to its subjugation under the oppressive rule of Rome and, later, Byzantium in Palestine; and the literary use of the spoken local dialects of Aramaic alongside Hebrew. The Talmuds produced by Palestine and Babylonia in this period contained a large proportion of Haggada, statements dealing with theological and ethical matters and using stories, anecdotes, and parables to illustrate certain points. This material was later an influence on Hebrew fiction of the Middle Ages and of the modern period. (See also Judaism: The literature of Judaism.)

Literary revival, 500–1000

In the 6th century, some Jewish groups attempted to enforce the exclusive use of Hebrew in the synagogue, this tendency being part of a Hebrew revival that began in Palestine and spread westward but did not reach Babylonia until the 10th century.

Piyyuṭim

Synagogues began in this period to appoint official precentors, part of whose duty it was to compose poetical additions to the liturgy on special sabbaths and festivals. The authors were called payṭanim (from Greek poiētēs, “poet”), their poems piyyuṭim. The keynote was messianic fervour and religious exuberance. Besides employing the entire biblical, Mishnaic, and Aramaic vocabularies, the payṭanim coined thousands of new words. Such poems, presupposing a highly educated audience, abound in recondite allusions and contain exhaustive lists of rites and laws. It is known that the most outstanding poets—Phineas the Priest, Yose ben Yose, Yannai, and Eleazar ha-Kalir, or ben Kalir—lived in that order, but when or where in Palestine any of them lived is not known. The accepted datings are 3rd century and 5th–6th century AD. Many piyyuṭim are still used in the synagogue.

Adoption of Arabic metre

Biblical Hebrew was re-established as the literary idiom about 900 by Saʾadia ben Joseph, grammarian and religious polemicist. The Arabic system of quantitative metre was adapted for Hebrew during this period (900–1000), probably by Dunash ben Labrat. At first the piyyuṭ form was retained for religious poems, and the new metres were used only for secular poetry, which closely imitated Arabic models and, like the latter, was chiefly employed for laudatory addresses to prominent people.

The Middle Ages

The Palestinian tradition in Europe, 800–1300

From Palestine, the Hebrew renaissance soon spread into the Byzantine Empire. In Sicily and southern Italy (which belonged to Byzantium) several important payṭanim were at work, and before 1000 a secular literature began to arise in Italy: a fantastic travelogue of Eldad the Danite; a historical romance, Sefer ha-yashar (1625; Eng. trans., Sefer ha-yashar, the Book of the Righteous) and Josippon, a revision of Josephus’ Antiquities filled with legendary incidents—this last-named book was popular until modern times and was translated into many languages. Nathan ben Yehiel completed in 1101 at Rome a dictionary of Talmudic Aramaic and Hebrew, the ʿArukh, which is still used.

In the middle of the 10th century members of the north Italian family Kalonymos brought Talmudic studies and piyyuṭim to Mainz, Ger., where the yeshiva (school) became a centre of studies under the direction of Gershom ben Judah, known as “the Light of the Exile.” As a poet, he established a distinctive style of European piyyuṭ in poems that read very much like early European popular poetry. The greatest alumnus of the Mainz academy was Rashi, an author of complete commentaries on the Bible and on the Babylonian Talmud, himself a poet of note.

The slaughter of Jewish peoples in western and central Europe during the Crusades drove large masses of Jews into eastern Europe. The German Jews carried with them their Yiddish speech but hardly any literary culture. In Germany accounts of the disaster were written in a new prose style permeated with poetry; liturgical poetry became henceforth mainly a chronicle of persecutions. These sufferings inspired an important mystical movement, largely propagated through stories, of which the chief collections are the Ayn Shoyn Mayse Bukh (1602; Maʿaseh Book) and the Sefer Ḥasidim (1538; “The Book of the Just”), the latter attributed to Judah ben Samuel, “the Hasid” of Regensburg (died 1217).

The golden age in Spain, 900–1200

Spanish Jewry began to flourish in Muslim Spain under the caliphate of Córdoba, where Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a vizier, was the first great patron of Hebrew letters. His secretary, Menahem ben Saruk (died c. 970), wrote a biblical lexicon, which was criticized by Dunash ben Labrat when the latter arrived in Spain with philological ideas from the East. Samuel ha-Nagid, vizier of Granada (990–1055), himself a poet and philologist, gathered around him a group of poets, most outstanding among whom was Ibn Gabirol. Moses ibn Ezra of Granada (died c. 1139) was the centre of a brilliant circle of poets. Moses’ kinsman Abraham ibn Ezra, a poet, philosopher, grammarian, and Bible commentator, attacked the language and style of the early payṭanim; he and Judah ben Samuel Halevi were the first to use Arabic metres in religious poems. Dominated by Arab standards of taste, the secular poetry dealt with themes of Arabic poetry and often reproduced Arabic phrases; it was written to be appreciated by a small circle of connoisseurs and declined with the collapse of Jewish prosperity in Muslim Spain. The last major poet in Spain was Judah ben Solomon Harizi, who translated various philosophical works into Hebrew.

The use of biblical Hebrew was made possible by the work of philologists. Of great importance was the creation of comparative linguistics by Judah ibn Kuraish (about 900) and Isaac ibn Barun (about 1100). Judah Hayyuj, a disciple of Menahem ben Saruk, recast Hebrew grammar, and, in the form given to it by David Kimhi of Narbonne (died c. 1235), the new system was taken over by the Christian humanists and through them by modern scholarship. The first complete Hebrew grammar, Kitāb al-lumaʿ (1886; “The Book of the Variegated Flower Beds”), was written by Ibn Janāḥ of Córdoba (died 1050).

Jewish medieval philosophers in Spain wrote in Arabic, not Hebrew, until the 13th century. Apart from Isaac Israeli (north Africa, died c. 940) few medieval Jews made original contributions to science, but the Spanish Jews shared the best scientific education. Abraham bar Hiyya (died c. 1136) of Barcelona was an original mathematician who wrote in Hebrew works on mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy. When the Almohads expelled the Jews from Muslim Spain in 1148, many learned refugees went to Languedoc and Provence and there translated scientific and philosophical works.

The period of retrenchment, 1200–1750

Hebrew culture in western Europe

From 1200 to 1750 was the era of the ghetto, during which the area of western European Hebrew culture shrank to a remnant in Italy, while an entirely different culture arose in eastern Europe. The appearance in 1200 of the Hebrew version, translated from Arabic, of Moses Maimonides’ Moreh Nevukhim (1851–85; The Guide of the Perplexed), which applied Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy to biblical and rabbinic theology, provoked orthodox circles into opposition to all secular studies. As a result of Maimonides’ work, there was a return to Neoplatonist mysticism in a form known as Kabbala. This culminated in the theosophy of the Zohar (1560; “The Book of Splendor”), which is ascribed to Moses de Leon and which exercised an influence comparable only with that of the Bible and Talmud. Hebrew culture, however, was reduced to a miniature scale in the West after the expulsion of the Jews from England (1290), from France (1306), and from Spain (1492). It continued in Italy, where it remained in contact with contemporary Christian thought. The most outstanding figure was the mystical philosopher Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto, who wrote a work on poetics and three remarkably modern plays.

Eastern Europe and the religious crisis

In the kingdom of Poland (which then extended from Lithuania to the Black Sea) refugees from German persecution mingled with earlier Byzantine émigrés to create, by the 15th century, a prosperous Jewry with extensive autonomy. Their culture was not a continuation of western European Hebrew civilization but a new creation. The Bible (except for the Pentateuch) was neglected, while the Babylonian Talmud—hitherto studied only by specialists—became the basis of all intellectual life, particularly since the so-called pilpul method of Jacob Pollak had turned its study into an exciting form of mental gymnastics. The typical literature consisted of novellae (hiddushim), ingenious discussions of Talmudic minutiae written in an ungrammatical mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic. Imaginative literature existed only in Yiddish, for women and the uneducated.

The expulsion from Spain produced a wave of messianic emotion. Kabbala flourished in Safad, the new Palestinian centre, the meeting place of Spanish, European, and Oriental Jews. There, in 1570–72, Isaac Luria created a cosmic messianism. Though its formulation, in the writings of his pupil Ḥayyim Vital, was abstruse and esoteric, its phraseology penetrated the widest masses, as a result of the introduction of Kabbalist prayers, and coloured all later Hebrew writing. Luria’s teachings were developed by the false messiah Sabbatai Zebi in the next century, for and against whom a vast literature was written.

The sufferings of Polish Jewry in the Cossack massacres of 1648—described in a long poem by the Talmudist Yom Ṭov Lipmann Heller—opened their country to Lurianic mysticism. Out of popular Kabbalist elements, Israel ben Eliezer, called the Baʿal Shem Ṭov, produced Ḥasidism. His teaching, like that of his successors, was oral and, of course, in Yiddish; but it was noted by disciples in a simple, colloquially flavoured Hebrew. Since they taught mainly through parables, this may be considered to mark the beginning of the Hebrew short story. Indeed these narratives exercised, and still exercise, a profound influence on modern Hebrew writers.

The 18th and 19th centuries

In the 18th century the conservative mystical movement of Ḥasidism spread rapidly over all eastern Europe except Lithuania. There, Elijah ben Solomon of Vilna, a writer of unusually wide scope, advocated a better graded course of Talmudic training. Shneur Zalman of Ladi created the highly systematized Ḥabad Ḥasidism, which was widely accepted in Lithuania. The Musar movement of Israel Salanter encouraged the study of medieval ethical writers.

Beginnings of the Haskala movement

In the Berlin of Frederick II the Great, young intellectuals from Poland and elsewhere, brought in as teachers, met representatives of the European Enlightenment; they came under the influence of Moses Mendelssohn and also met some representatives of Italian and Dutch Hebrew cultures. One, a Dane, Naphtali Herz Wessely, who had spent some time in Amsterdam, wrote works on the Hebrew language, and another, an Italian, Samuel Aaron Romanelli, wrote and translated plays. Out of these contacts grew Haskala (“Enlightenment”), a tendency toward westernization that venerated Hebrew and medieval western Jewish literature. Among German Jews, then already in rapid process of Germanization, this Hebrew movement had no place. The Enlightenment was introduced in Galicia (Austrian Poland), a centre of Ḥasidism, by the Edict of Toleration (1781) of the emperor Joseph II. By supporting some of its aims, Hebrew writers incurred hatred and persecution. Their chief weapon was satire, and the imitation by Joseph Perl of the Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515; “Letters of Obscure Men”) of Crotus Rubianus and the essays of Isaac Erter were classics of the genre. One poet, Meir Letteris, and one dramatist, Naḥman Isaac Fischman, wrote biblical plays.

Romanticism

Galicia’s chief contribution was to the Jüdische Wissenschaft, a school of historical research with Romanticist leanings. The impact of Haskala ideas upon the humanistic Italo-Hebrew tradition produced a short literary renaissance. Its main connections were with the Jüdische Wissenschaft, to which Isaac Samuel Reggio contributed. Samuel David Luzzatto, a prolific essayist, philologist, poet, and letter writer, became prominent by his philosophy of Judaism, while a poet, Rachel Morpurgo, struck some remarkably modern chords. For the Jews of the Russian Empire, the Enlightenment proper began with Isaac Baer Levinsohn in the Ukraine and with Mordecai Aaron Ginzberg (Günzburg), in Lithuania. In the 1820s an orthodox reaction set in, coinciding with the rise of a Romanticist Hebrew school of writers. A.D. Lebensohn wrote fervent love songs to the Hebrew language, and his son Micah Joseph (Mikhal)Judah, the most gifted poet of the Haskala period, wrote biblical romances and pantheistic nature lyrics. The first Hebrew novel, Ahavat Ziyyon (1853; “The Love of Zion”), by Abraham Mapu, was a Romantic idyll, in which Mapu, like all Haskala writers, employed phrases culled from the Bible and adapted to the thought the writer wished to express.

Mapu’s third novel, ʿAyiṭ tzavuaʿ (1857–69; “The Hypocrite”), marked a departure. It dealt with contemporary life and attacked its social evils and portrayed a new type, the maskil (possessor of Haskala), in a fight against orthodox obscurantism. The new, aggressive Haskala soon came under the influence of Russian left-wing writers, such as Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev. Judah Leib Gordon, like Mapu, had started as a Romantic writer on biblical subjects. From 1871 onward he produced a series of ballads exposing the injustices of traditional Jewish life. Moses Leib Lilienblum began as a moderate religious reformer but later became absorbed by social problems, and in Mishnat Elisha ben Abuyah (1878; “The Opinions of Elisha ben Abuyah”) he preached Jewish socialism. Peretz Smolenskin created in six novels a kaleidoscope of Jewish life in which he rejected the westernized Jew as much as orthodox reactionaries did.

Modern literature in Hebrew

Formative influences

The first formative influences on 20th-century Hebrew literature belong to the late 19th century. The middle classes of eastern European Jewry that read Hebrew books turned to Jewish nationalism, and Zionist activity, coupled with the movement for speaking Hebrew, widened the circle of Hebrew readers. Hebrew daily papers began to appear in 1886. Writers borrowed extensively from medieval translators and European languages, and the Hebrew language assumed a new character. A key figure in the transition to modern writing was Shalom Jacob Abramowitsch, who wrote under the pseudonym of Mendele Mokher Sefarim; after his first novel he became convinced that biblical Hebrew was unsuitable for modern subjects and turned to Yiddish. From 1886 onward he returned to writing mainly in Hebrew and by using Hebrew and Aramaic phrases from the Talmud was able to capture the homeliness he prized in Yiddish. His stories depicted life as it really was, and his style and support of traditional values attracted a wide readership. The popularity of his stories of ghetto life ensured that they would remain the most read and written genre of Hebrew literature until the mid-20th century. A group of writers adopted “grandfather Mendele” as their model. One of these, Asher Ginzberg (Aḥad Haʿam), wrote, from 1889 onward, articles evolving a secular philosophy of Jewish nationalism. His periodical ha-Shiloaḥ attained editorial standards previously unknown in Hebrew. From 1921, he devoted his last years to the editing of his correspondence, a valuable documentary of the period.

Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, an important poet, essayist, editor, and anthologist of medieval literature, was, for a time, literary editor of ha-Shiloaḥ and was much influenced by Aḥad Haʿam. His poetry expressed the inner struggles of a generation concerned about its attitude to Jewish tradition. Saul Tchernichowsky, on the other hand, was untroubled by tradition, and his poetry dealt with love, beauty, and the three places where he had lived: the Crimea, Germany, and Palestine. Isaac Leib Peretz, who wrote both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, introduced the Ḥasidic, or pietistic devotional, element into literature. The emotionalism and simple joy of life of that milieu thereafter strongly influenced writers, and the language absorbed many Ḥasidic terms. A literary historian, Ruben Brainin, discerned the presence of a “new trend” in literature and foresaw a concentration on human problems. Bialik had already pointed to a conflict between Judaism and the natural instincts of Jews. This psychological interest dominated the work of a group of short-story writers and, in particular, that of the writer and critic David Frischmann, who, more than anyone else, imposed European standards on Hebrew literature. European literary tendencies thus became absorbed into Hebrew. Uprooted by the pogroms of 1881 and the two Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Jews had emigrated to western Europe and America, and Hebrew literary activity in eastern Europe was disrupted. The Soviet Union eventually banned Hebrew culture, and it also decayed in other eastern European countries and in Germany as the position of Jews deteriorated.

Émigré and Palestinian literature

The writers of this generation were known as the émigré writers. Their work was pessimistic, as the rootlessness without hope of Uri Nissan Gnessin and Joseph Ḥayyim Brenner exemplified. The majority of writers active in Palestine before 1939 were born in the Diaspora (Jewish communities outside Palestine) and were concerned with the past. An exception was Yehuda Burla, who wrote about Jewish communities of Middle Eastern descent. The transition from ghetto to Palestine was achieved by few writers, among them Asher Barash, who described the early struggles of Palestinian Jewry. S.Y. Agnon, the outstanding prose writer of this generation (and joint winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature), developed an original style that borrowed from the Midrash (homiletical commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures), stories, and ethical writings of earlier centuries. While his earlier stories were set in Galicia, he later began to write about Palestine. In Ore’aḥ nataʿ lalun (1938; A Guest for the Night) the narrator recounts his return to his native town in Galicia. Temol shilshom (1945; Only Yesterday), widely regarded as Agnon’s finest work, satirizes the ideals of both secular Zionism and religious Judaism.

Poetry immediately addressed Palestinian life. Among outstanding writers were Rachel (Rachel Bluwstein), who wrote intensely personal poems; Uri Zevi Greenberg, a political poet and exponent of free verse; and Abraham Shlonsky, who would lead Israel’s Symbolist school.

Israeli literature

World War II and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948–49 brought to the fore Palestinian-born writers who dealt with the problems of their generation in colloquially flavoured Hebrew. In the State of Israel, where Hebrew had become the official language, literature developed on a large scale, mainly along contemporary western European and American lines. The extreme diversity in culture of parts of the population and the problems of new immigrants provided the main themes for fiction. Poetry flourished, but original drama at first was slow to develop. Greenberg’s Rehovot HaNahar (1951; “Streets of the River”) traces the process by which the humiliation of the massacred is transmuted by the pride of martyrdom into the historical impulse of messianic redemption. In a long dramatic poem, Bein ha-Esh ve-ha-Yesha (1957; Between the Fire and Salvation), Aaron Zeitlin envisioned the annihilation of European Jewry in mystical terms, examining the relationship of catastrophe and redemption.

Native Israeli prose writers wrote of their life in the kibbutz, the underground, and the war of 1948–49. S. Yizhar and Moshe Shamir emerged as the outstanding representatives of this generation, probing the sensibility of the individual in a group-oriented society. But the establishment of the State of Israel could not allay the anxieties of the individual. The dominant themes of writers who had no access to collective ideals were personal ones—frustration, confusion, and alienation. The works of Yehuda Amichai and Haim Gouri are representative of the poetry of this period and of the following decades; their poems emphasize the dissolution of social coherence and express the individual devoid of a sense of historical and spiritual mission. The novelist Aharon Megged’s Ha-Hai ʿal ha-met (1965; The Living on the Dead) casts a putative hero of the pioneer generation in an ironic light.

Memories of the Holocaust haunt the lyrical work of Aharon Appelfeld. Flight and hiding are the characteristic situations of his early stories. His Badenhaim, ʿir nofesh (Badenheim 1939), published in 1975, captures the ominous atmosphere of the approaching Holocaust sensed by a group of assimilated Jews vacationing at an Austrian resort. It describes social and spiritual disintegration, as do his novels Tor ha-peli ʾot (1978; The Age of Wonders) and Katerinah (1989; Katerina). Appelfeld’s many other novels and novellas consider the theme of the survivor’s spiritual paralysis (as, for example, in Bartfus ben ha-almavet [1988; The Immortal Bartfuss]) at the same time that they explore the frozen spiritual landscape of the post-Holocaust world.

The New Wave is the name given to the generation of prose writers who began publishing in the late 1950s and ’60s. Shimon Ballas’s novel Ha-Maʾabarah (1964; “The Transit Camp”), which describes the struggle of immigrants from Iraq in an Israeli transit camp, is one of the first books in which the absorption of Jewish immigrants of the Mizrahi religious Zionist movement is recounted from the immigrant’s perspective. But many New Wave writers—including A.B. Yehoshua, Yaʿakov Shabtai, and Amos Oz—made attempts in their early work to distance themselves from preoccupations with Israeli reality. In Yehoshua’s stories the narrator’s tone is remote and the people are drained of emotion. Occasionally, an act of feeling or meaning breaks the mood of boredom and illuminates a character’s humanity. In both Ha-Meʿahev (1976; The Lover) and Gerusḥim meʾuḥarim (1982; A Late Divorce), Yehoshua explores the confrontation between the philosophy of his generation and the ideology of the Zionist founders. His Mar Mani (1990; Mr. Mani), a complex and innovative work about a Sephardic family whose history is linked to the significant events in Diaspora and Israeli history, spans a period of 150 years. Shabtai’s novel Zikhron devarim (1977; Past Continuous) broke new ground in its evocation of the family in society. Oz, in a series of later novels, confronted the difficulties of life in Israel. Kufsah sheḥora (1987; Black Box) utilizes a satirical epistolary style to depict a family at war with itself, while La-daʾat ishah (1989; To Know a Woman) also details family relationships. Panter ba-martef (1994; Panther in the Basement), written from the point of view of a child, is set in Palestine in 1947 as British rule over the region is coming to an end. Oto ha-yam (1999; The Same Sea) is an unconventional novel of love, family, and loss, written in a mixture of poetry and prose.

Personal frustration and religious vision are the subjects of the novelist Pinḥas Sadeh. Yitzḥak Orpaz’s novels tend toward psychological exploration, particularly in the series beginning with Bayit le-adam eḥad (1975; “One Man’s House”). Yoram Kaniuk’s work examines the alienated Israeli, but Ha-Yehudi ha-aḥaron (1981; The Last Jew) explores the Israeli experience as a response to the Holocaust. The realistic stories of Yitzḥak Ben Ner are set in rural and urban communities (Sheḳiʿah kefarit [1976; “A Rustic Sunset”] and Ereẓ reḥokah [1981; “A Distant Land”]). The writings of Amalia Kahana-Carmon explore the subjective impressions of experience and the complexities of time and memory through a stream-of-consciousness technique.

In the 1980s and ’90s a new generation of writers, including Yehoshuʿa Ḳenaz and David Grossman, began to emerge. Ḳenaz’s Hitganvut yeḥidim (1986; “Heart Murmur”; Eng. trans. Infiltration) depicts a group of recruits in the Israeli army who are representative of Israeli society. Grossman’s ʿAyen ʿerekh: ahavah (1986; See Under: Love), a novel about the Holocaust, is regarded by some as one of the great novels of the modern period. In Viḳṭoryah (1993; Victoria) Sami Michael traced the history of a Baghdadi family in Israel. The experiences of immigrants from North African and Middle Eastern countries were described by other writers, including Albert Swissa in his novel ʿAḳud (1990; “The Bound One”) and the poets Ronny Someck, Erez Biṭon, and Maya Bejerano. Yoel Hoffmann, whose work is characterized by stylistic experimentation and the influence of Japanese literature, represented the experience of German Jewish immigrants to Palestine in Bernharṭ (1989; Bernhard) and Krisṭus shel dagim (1991; The Christ of Fish).

In the last decades of the 20th century, writers explored a wide variety of themes and styles, influenced more than previously by American popular culture. In Agadat ha-agamim ha-ʿatsuvim (1989; “The Legend of the Sad Lakes”) Itamar Levi attempted to confront the subject of the Holocaust in a surrealistic manner. One of the phenomena of these decades was the appearance of a number of women writers, including Judith Katzir, ʿEdnah Mazya, Orly Castel-Bloom, and many others, who provided a powerful alternative to the male voice that had dominated Hebrew letters from the start of the modern period. Many of these writers traced their own family histories. The literary world of Leʾah Eni (Leah Aini) is one of memory, in which two central elements intersect: the community in which she spent her childhood and the Holocaust. The work of Hanna Bat Shahar (a pseudonym) deals predominantly with the inner world of women who are bound by the strict rules and customs of Orthodox communities.

At the turn of the 21st century, Hebrew poetry remained innovative. Some poets addressed subjects previously considered taboo for Hebrew literature, such as homosexuality. The poetry of Itamar Yaʿoz-Ḳesṭ, Admiel Kosman, Benyamin Shvili, and Chava Pinchas-Cohen (Ḥava Pinḥas-Kohen) tended toward broadly metaphysical, even religious, expression.